Revision as of 08:54, November 12, 2012

Glitch Pokémon are Pokémon in the video game series that are the result of scrambled or leftover data that can be found by use of cheat devices, glitches, and other ways. Glitch Pokémon are not intentionally placed inside the game; they consist of data that the game reads incorrectly under certain circumstances. Most of them cause no harmful or severe damage to a save file, but some are known to trigger negative effects that can be potentially irreversible. These effects include save-data corruption and/or deletion.

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Explanation

In the Pokémon games, a variety of variables are used to identify the species of a Pokémon. During a battle, for example, variables in the game's memory would store the species of your Pokémon and your foe's Pokémon. Glitch Pokémon exist because these variables are (by necessity) too large.

In all cases, those variables are capable of referring to more Pokémon than there actually are in the game. When such a variable is set to refer to a non-existent Pokémon, the game ends up treating non-Pokemon data (such as graphics, music, and program code) as Pokémon data.

The effect is that in Generation I games, there are 105 glitch Pokémon, including duplicates and not including "hybrids". In Generation II games, there are exactly 5 glitch Pokémon (including EGGs). In Generation III games, there are 101 glitch Pokémon (because Unown's twenty-six forms count as twenty-six separate species, forming a total of 411 non-glitch Pokémon).